I Know What I Saw

20 Sunday

For now, all I can do is wait. The hours pass, bearing witness to just a few souls passing by. People arrive occasionally by car, drivers stepping briskly out to open doors and shut them again. But pedestrians – there are only a handful. Nobody notices me. In the anonymity of these clothes, I am absolved from the usual sidelong glances of people that see me as a threat, without looking at me properly.

The afternoon has drawn in and the chill comes. It begins to occur to me that he might not be there. He might have left just before I came. Perhaps he’s not even in the country. The curtains are drawn too tightly to discern anything. A spike of cold air prods at my body so I get up to look for some insulation. It only takes a few minutes to find a newspaper on the seat of a nearby bus stop and to stuff balls into my cuffs. A few minutes later and I begin to warm up, swollen with paper.

I rub my hands before putting them into my pockets. My fingers touch the cigarette lighter and I draw it out to examine it in the light. A flash of a memory comes to me. Lighting a cigarette in the heavy rain. Pushing open that door to 42B.

Seb in fact didn’t smoke. Or at least he didn’t when I knew him and hasn’t these last days. Nina and I were the smokers. She, the elegant smoker with thin cigarettes that smelled like Turkish Delight. Me, the needy chain-smoker. Grace didn’t like smoking and made a face whenever I lit up. ‘Could you try cutting down?’ she’d say.

‘I could. But then I wouldn’t be cool any more.’

And then another memory comes slicing through the fog. I met her for dinner once, after she had left me, and she lit up a cigarette at the table as the waiter brought our menus. I raised an eyebrow at her.

‘What? Only you’re allowed to smoke?’ she’d said.

‘No, I just—’

‘What?’ she said irritably.

‘I just thought you were smarter than that.’

She stubbed out the cigarette on a saucer. The top of her chest flushed – red and bare. She caught me looking at the place where her pendant used to sit. ‘I lost it somewhere in the move,’ she said, fingering the space. ‘In the flat.’

Now I see the door to number 42B open. Ebadi steps out and shuts it behind him to an elongated beep. He walks along the street away from me, merrily almost, jangling keys at his side and over to a small silver Porsche. The indicators flash as he opens the door and gets in. Then he is gone, the car growling as it powers up the road and away out of sight.

I look up again at the house. Silent. Locked. Empty. Can I get in?

That door opened once before. I try and remember what it was like on the inside and the lock, was it an old Yale?

When we were teenagers at school, there was a craze of trying to pick locks. We had all seen something on TV with the Man from U.N.C.L.E. or James Bond or something else implausible. A hairpin would go in, the hero would grin at the girl and a flick of the wrist later there’d be the confident oiled click of an opening lock.

When Rory and I tried it, it didn’t work. Not once in hours of trying.

Then, because we were who we were, we took out books and read in encyclopaedias about how locks worked. Some of the words come to mind now: base pins, cylinders, the shear line where all the pins line up. We learned about ‘bumping’ and how you could force a key through the lock to make the pins jump before quickly turning the lock.

But it never worked. We never managed to pick a single lock, though we pretended to the others at school that we had. That we didn’t have the tools on us, but we could do it if we ever needed to.

There was another way, though. Funny, I haven’t thought of this for so long I have to close my eyes to lure the memory into light.

In the early days when I squatted, when the street hadn’t yet penetrated into me. When I was fresh. I remember how much I hated communal living, the smells, the grating nerves and tensions. But occasionally people shared tips. Where to get soup on Monday, who had a supply of methadone. Which shelters had waiting lists and which ones would never turn you away.

In one of the bigger communes, I remember a man – I don’t remember his name – a snake-faced man with no hair and round blue eyes. He grinned all the time as if he knew something nobody else did.

‘You can always find a place if you use your nut,’ he said. He would say this kind of thing – meaningless leftovers from some other half-digested conversations he’d once had.

I nodded. Sometimes it was better to let the talk exhaust itself.

‘Arches. Disused shops. Commercial property. Lock-ups – that’s my thing,’ he said, taking a gulp of lager from a can. For breakfast.

‘So, if it’s a lock-up, how do you get in? Isn’t it locked up?’ an older man next to me said drunkenly.

‘Ha! Yeah, mate. But you got to choose your whatsit.’

I looked blankly at him as I turned out my boots to dry them.

‘So, certain locks you can open. Like Yales. If they got a Yale or even a small padlock, then you’re in, mate.’

‘How?’ I said, suddenly interested, remembering my picking days.

‘Lloyd key,’ he said. I looked at him and waited.

‘What, you don’t know what a Lloyd key is? ’kin’ hell, mate.’

Within five minutes he had made me one from an old plastic cider bottle. It was just a strip of plastic around three inches wide and about six inches long.

‘It’s the curve on the bottle that gets round the door jamb. You just shove it in through the gap and over the lock bit and then push. Most doors will open to that. Design flaw, innit,’ he said, before flicking it away on the ground.

How many years ago was that? Ten? Twenty? Longer? There is nothing in my memory of that place that ties it to a time period. No flat-screen TVs. No chintz. No shagpile carpet. Just bare floors and boarded-up windows. The heavy, toxic scent of mould.

A siren blares in the distance and I am jolted out of the reverie. Midday has long gone and from the position of the sun in the sky, I know it must be late afternoon. I walk to a parade of shops near the library and look for a recycling bin outside one of the shops. I find one and scavenge what I need and return to my spot. The Porsche isn’t there – Ebadi hasn’t returned. Hunger makes a call but I dismiss it to sit and carve out my own Lloyd key from a plastic bottle. The cans these days are flimsy and won’t cut so I scout around until I find an empty lager bottle. I tap its neck against the kerb until it breaks. Now I test the edge with my finger – it’s sharp and slices easily through the plastic. The key cut, I settle in to wait. I can’t do this in the light. It will have to wait until the sun has gone and I have gathered some darkness over me.

I turn the plastic in my hands. An hour passes. With each spent minute I know he is closer to returning home. And now the light has finally dropped, I am here, up against the door to 42B. Those large stone steps up to my left shield me a little from view, but there is nobody around anyway.

I press the edge of the Lloyd between the door and the frame where the Yale is. My heart is beating faster than I want it to, so I have to take a break to give it time to settle. But my headache has returned and I’m beginning to think of it as an alarm or a warning. What I am doing here? Breaking into this house seems like the worst thing that I can do. I don’t know what I am hoping to achieve except I know there is something going on. Either that footage was showing the wrong house or something behind this door is a fraud.

My breathing settles somewhat and I grip the plastic hard and shove it into the gap. It bends, too early. I withdraw it, straighten it and put it through again from a different angle where the plastic seems more rigid. Then the edge hits something solid and what must be the edge of the latch.

Suddenly the sound of a siren in the distance sends my heart into my throat. I know that it’s not near enough to be a threat but I have pulled the plastic out again. I pause, attuned and ready for the slightest sound now my back is against the street.

Silence again. I put the Lloyd key, this plastic scrap, back into the gap and push hard. Then through the wood I sense that the plastic has caught the smooth curve of the lock. And then it hits me, and I freeze: the beep when he left. That sound – the long beep. There’s an alarm. I can’t break in. But, more than that, the alarm is new. It wasn’t there before. He’s just installed this. To hide something? What else could be the reason for the sudden need for security? And then there’s my story – he knows having an alarm will interfere with my account. I won’t be able to explain how I got inside if there had been an alarm to get past.